Students plan their own walkout for gun control: 'We're in this for the long haul'

Nearly every other night after that Valentine's Day shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, 16-year-old Caroline, a Park Hill South High School sophomore, fell into slumber and saw herself and a group of friends trapped in the school auditorium.

A gunman barges in and riddles the room with bullets from a semi-automatic weapon.

The terrifying dreams continued for a month. They subsided when Caroline, a military child who lived in Italy and Hawaii before moving to the Kansas City area, joined with students across the country in the first National Walkout Day on March 14 to honor the 17 — students and teachers — killed at Stoneman Douglas.

Standing up against gun violence, she said, "has changed everything. I found my voice.... I want to be able to tell my children I stood for something bigger than myself."

It's why Caroline and a group of about 16 other high school and college students across the Kansas City area have planned another rally against gun violence at 11:30 a.m. Friday in Hyde Park, 3619 Gillham Road in Kansas City.

The event will be part of a series of nationally corresponding marches, rallies and student walkouts to be completely planned and carried out by students without adult leadership, said Danielle Foster, an 18-year-old senior at Lincoln College Preparatory Academy and one of the Kansas City rally organizers.

Danielle said area students from both the inner city and the surrounding suburbs are following the lead of Parkland teens, who in February launched a national student movement calling for the ban of semi-automatic assault weapons, stricter background checks and for lawmakers to enact sensible gun control laws.

"We just believe that it shouldn't be easier to get a gun than it is to get a driver's license," said Danielle, who has been a local spokesperson in the movement since March.

"We just don't think that this country is going in the right direction," she said "They want to arm teachers. That makes no sense. People actually think the solution to the gun problem is more guns. We have a drug problem in this country, no one is calling for more drugs."

It's expected that on Friday, April 20, the 19th anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting in Littleton, Colo., students from hundreds of school districts across the nation will take some action, either walking out of classes to stand together on school property or participating in an off-grounds rally.

More than 190 school shootings have occurred in the nation's schools since Columbine, according to a report in The Washington Post.

"The goal of this event is to fight for legislation so that school shootings like Columbine, Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas will never happen again," said Julian Kiwinda, a senior at Center High School and an organizer of the local rally.

The Kansas City area youth began organizing Friday's rally via social media group chats immediately following the March 24 national "March For Our Lives" event, which drew thousands of children and adults to the Kansas City Plaza area. That rally was organized through a coordinated effort between students and some adult gun control and gun safety advocacy groups.

Students planning Friday's rally held their first face-to-face meeting just over a week ago.

"A lot of this entire national movement has been done through social media," said Caroline. "And it is how we have gotten the word out about our rally to students."

Danielle said she learned a lot about planning this event from having worked with the adults who helped pull off the Kansas City "March For Our Lives" event. She said she found inspiration from studying what happened during the 1968 riots in Kansas City where hundreds of students walked out of school to protest racial injustice in the country after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

"We have to look at social media as an advantage," Danielle said. "In the 1968 race riots in Kansas City they didn't have social media. They were just relying on pay phones. We can make this a much bigger thing using social media. It's like with every 100 people you can contact using pay phones, with social media you can hit up a thousand."

It's social media, she said that has made the movement so successful, because high school students in Kansas City feel connected to students in Florida or New York or Chicago.

That, Danielle said, and the "enough is enough" attitude the Parkland students adopted. "They were the ones who instead of just mourning, they stood up and said we are going to make a change. And that is what it took to galvanize the country."

Kansas City organizers of the Midtown KC Rally are expecting 300 to 500 students to show up.

The students involved in planning the rally represent school districts across the area, including Park Hill, Kansas City Public Schools, North Kansas City, Blue Springs, Kansas City, Kan., Center and Shawnee Mission. Private schools including Pembroke, Bishop Miege and Rockhurst also are involved as well as students from University of Missouri-Kansas City and Rockhurst University.

Using a Go-fund-Me on-line fund-raising account, students raised more than $1,000 to pay for city permits, portable bathrooms and arrange for a sound set up. Students are building the stage and podium for the event and hosting a voter registration table.

A half-hour of peaceful protest will begin at 11:30 a.m. Students will perform music and poetry starting at noon. Protesters are encouraged to wear orange, the National Walkout 2018 color.

On the Midtown KC Rally Facebook page, organizers urged that students planning to come to the rally "get absence forms (or the equivalent) from your school in order to attend the rally without being truant."

Danielle said a long list of area high schools are carving out 17 minutes at some point in the school day and letting students walk out on to school grounds and hold a quick rally for safe schools.

Others have said students who come to school and then leave for the off-campus rally without parent permission would be considered truant.

Shawnee Mission East principal John McKinney said students at his school have organized a 17-minute walkout to remember the 17 killed in Parkland and to create a platform to discuss issues around creating safe schools.

"Students who want to participate in the larger rally (or a similar activity) should have their parents call attendance so we can excuse their absence," McKinney said. Those who leave without permission, he said, would be marked for an unexcused absence but not disciplined.

"It's better not to come to school at all, then to come for a while and then leave," said Danielle, who is planning with other organizers to take the day off to prepare for the rally.

They want students to show up with posters "and an attitude for change," Julian said. "We're in this for the long haul. I'm tired of losing friends to gun violence. We are dedicated to this cause."

This story was originally published April 17, 2018 at 11:17 AM with the headline "Students plan their own walkout for gun control: 'We're in this for the long haul'."